CLAS Struggle : New Student Assessment Exams Get Poor Marks on Readers’ Report Cards

Sinister rumors about the state’s new CLAS exams have circulated in Ventura County since spring, but the real thing was in Camarillo on Monday.

And some people who have been opposed to the test all along said it confirmed their worst fears.

“From what I’ve read so far, it sounds like they’re trying to get the students on the psychiatrist’s couch,” said Steward Mimm, a retired advertising agent from Ventura who had just looked over a literature selection from the eighth-grade test.

Mimm was one of dozens of county residents who converged Monday on the county superintendent of schools’ office in Camarillo, where portions of the CLAS exams will be available for review for one month.

Eager to test rumor against reality, many of Monday’s visitors came within two hours of the curriculum display center’s 9 a.m. opening.

“I’ve heard such negative reports about this,” said Joy Gloyd, a Ventura grandmother who came with her daughter-in-law to review the tests Monday morning. “I wanted to see it for myself.”

After reading several exams, Gloyd said she failed to understand why some reading tests asked students to draw images depicting their reaction to literature selections.

“What does that teach?” Gloyd said. “I think it’s a waste of the taxpayers’ money.”

But state education officials are hoping the opportunity to view the CLAS exams will help quell such opposition. The display of the tests, which is taking place at 50 sites around the state, marks the first time the California Department of Education has made any of its statewide student assessment exams available to the public.

Because educators will have to rewrite all portions of the tests that the public sees to protect the exam’s integrity, only the most controversial sections are on display.

The math and social science exams are being kept under cover, but the reading and writing parts of exams that were given this spring to fourth-, eighth- and 10th-grade students across the state are available for review.

Each test booklet includes a short literature selection that is used as a basis for a series of essay-type questions.

CLAS critics have assailed the tests for including readings, such as excerpts from the Richard Wright autobiographical novel “Black Boy,” with violent or disturbing images, but state education officials have said they deliberately selected literature that would provoke responses from students.

“The whole idea is it’s an assessment of critical thinking skills, so it has to be something that will invoke your interest and cause you to think creatively,” state Department of Education spokeswoman Mary Lou Schmidt said.

If the aim of the tests is to provoke, they hit their target Monday.

As soon as Karen Koch finished reading an excerpt from “Black Boy” in an eighth-grade test booklet, she burst into tears.

“It’s too real,” Koch said. “I don’t think it needs to be in there. It hits too close to home.”

In the excerpt from Wright’s book, the author recounts how his mother, distraught after being left by her husband, gives him a big stick to fight off bullies in the neighborhood. He cracks the stick against the skulls of the some local gang members.

“It gives kids the wrong idea,” said Koch, a Ventura resident who came to the CLAS display with several fellow members of a politically conservative group called Concerned Women of America. “It makes him a hero for beating everyone up.”

Although many of the viewers Monday were from west county cities, Thousand Oaks resident Karen McLaine said some CLAS opponents from her city plan to look at the test today.

“It’s an important issue in terms of parental rights and privacy between the parents and the child and the school,” McLaine said. “Many of the questions are invasive of family privacy.”

Some viewers Monday objected that many of the reading excerpts were about minorities. State education officials, however, said at least as many white characters are in the stories as minorities.

Others complained that most of the stories, however realistic, were depressing.

“A lot of the stuff is true,” said Debbie Gloyd, Joy’s daughter-in-law. “But it’s still negative. There hasn’t been a happy, fun story in the bunch.”

Although many of the people who viewed the test Monday said they opposed the aim of CLAS--to ask students open-ended questions--Gloyd said she supports such essay-type assignments.

“Some of these techniques are good,” she said. She added, however, “They’d be good in a small classroom, but not in a statewide test.”

But Gloyd was one of only a few to find something positive to say about the revolutionary method of assessment that CLAS represents.

The open-ended questions--including some that ask students to relate a particular reading to their own lives--smacked more of psychology than English, some viewers said.

Joe Cascia, a manager of a Ventura equipment rental company, said he believes CLAS represents an effort by the government to take control of children away from families. “It’s just the government’s way of picking our children’s brains to find out (what they are thinking),” he said.

But state education spokeswoman Schmidt said asking students to write about their own lives is nothing new in the public schools.

The CLAS questions “are no more invasive than asking students to write about their summer vacations,” she said.

FYI

The reading and writing sections of the 1993-94 California Learning Assessment System exams for fourth, eighth and 10th grades can be viewed through Aug. 12 at the Ventura County Superintendent of Schools’ educational services center, 570 Airport Way, Camarillo. The center is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. In addition to the exams, copies of some students’ answers are available. Viewers may request photocopies at 10 cents per page, except the literature selections, which are protected by copyright laws. For more information, call the superintendent’s office at 388-4408.